Melissa Bowersock is an eclectic writer who turns her hand to any story that inspires her, be it fantasy, action, romance, satire or biography, and has found success with many genres. Her romance novel, Remember Me, was chosen as a finalist in Foreword Magazine’s Best of the Year Awards for 2005, and her fantasy novel, The Blue Crystal, made the semi-finals in Amazon’s 2009 Breakthru Novel Award contest. More recently, the Military Writers Society of America awarded her book Marcia Gates: Angel of Bataan a medal for biography at their book awards conference in 2012. The book was subsequently featured in a documentary on Wisconsin military history produced by WKOW-TV in Madison, titled Our Wisconsin: The Military History of America’s Dairyland. To date, Melissa has nine novels and the one non-fiction to her credit with, of course, more to come. She lives in a small desert community in southern Arizona. Continue reading “Meet the Author: Melissa Bowersock”
Category: Interviews
Book Brief: Forbidden Territory
Forbidden Territory
by Melissa Pearl and Brenda Howson
Genre: YA Thriller/Survival/Romance
Word count: 62,000
Mica and Lexy have been best friends and next-door neighbours since they were eight years old. They share everything and have no secrets from each other until… Tom arrives on Mica’s doorstep – a gorgeous exchange student from England. And Lexy is smitten.
Suddenly both girls are keeping secrets. Mica is hiding news about Tom’s English girlfriend and Lexy hasn’t got the heart to tell her best friend that her brother Eli, the guy Mica is mad on, thinks of her as only a friend.
After a massive fight, the girls decide the best way to mend their friendship is to spend some quality time together. And what better way than to go camping away from their parents and why not invite along the guys they are crushing on.
So the four teenagers embark on a geo-caching expedition into New Zealand’s native bush expecting a long weekend filled with flirtatious fun; instead secrets are exposed as they stumble across a hidden marijuana crop and its gun-wielding watchmen. Forced apart they spend the next forty-eight hours racing blindly in opposite directions as they fight to find each other before the hunters do.
This book is available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble. Continue reading “Book Brief: Forbidden Territory”
Book Brief: The Second Daughter
The Second Daughter
by J. Jeffrey
Genre: Literary Fiction, Women’s Fiction
Word count: 95,000
It had started out well. Umbrellas tangled. A storybook romance followed. A wonderful wedding. A beautiful, sweet first daughter. They were complete, a family, happy.
And then they went and had another daughter.
Her charming fraud of a father starts disappearing, then worse, coming back. Her once sweet older sister resents her, and the sisters are at constant war. Her poor harried mother is so busy what-iffing about the life she might have had that she overlooks the life she is actually having. Everyone blames younger daughter Debra for everything as the family disintegrates. Along the way there are secrets and lies, heartbreaks and betrayals, plus the dramatic unexpected death of a central character at a pivotal moment. Debra, now a young woman, finds herself living awkwardly alone with her embittered mother when the phone rings—and her mother’s secret past suddenly crashes back into the present. Their life may be about to change forever; or rather, perhaps, revert back to what it should have been all along.
But not because of that phone call, as it turns out.
Because of the remarkable second daughter. For what Debra Gale has is unyielding determination. What she has is an irrepressible capacity to love.
And now at last what she has is a chance.
The complex dynamics of a changing family. Mother, daughters, sisters, and the father who both divides and unites them. A fair amount of banana cream pie. The Second Daughter: a funny but poignant, unusual but beautiful love story.
This book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Continue reading “Book Brief: The Second Daughter”
Book Brief: Beauty Rising
Beauty Rising
by Mark W Sasse
Genre: General/Literary Fiction
Word count: 61,000
“My heart sank. I dumped my father’s ashes in the heart of communist Vietnam – over a thousand miles from the death of his comrades – over a thousand miles from the smile of that girl. How could I have been so stupid?”
Only the bumbling, overweight, thirtyish, stay-at-home Martin Kinney could have mistakenly flubbed his dying father’s request with such gusto. This thousand mile mistake awakens the ghosts of long-held family secrets and puts Martin on a fateful course with an unlikely romantic interest – a young, beautiful, yet troubled Vietnamese woman named My Phuong.
With its cross-cultural setting and unlikely romance, the 61,000 word novel Beauty Rising creates a powerful, unique voice in today’s literature. In a swift-moving, dialogue-driven prose which is funny, honest, tragic and unpredictable, Beauty Rising explores the depths of culture, family, and love as the Vietnam War, a generation removed, continues to hang on the periphery of society, cursing families and causing destruction.
This book is available from Amazon.